I currently mirror on Tapas and Webtoon and chop up my comic for vertical reading. Recently, I did a practice page for a different story with vertical format and I think I might be in love.

I've always don't traditional page structures, but that page is designed for a print book. I really like how vertical frees up panel limits, and makes me worry less about users spoiling the punch of a page by seeing the last panel early on. I really like what vertical scroll does with the flow, and would want to make my comic after Rethe take advantage of that.

But I'm stuck on two things
-I really like posting here. I've really enjoyed getting to know people on the forums and Kyo's made of a lot of great features. Do people think there's a way to make vertical scroll work on a site that isn't designed for it like Tapas or Webtoon? Do you think a primarily PC or laptop readerbase won't be interested? Would you ditch a comic in vertical scroll?
-Do you think making a vertical scroll comic takes out print as an option? Is there a good way to do it, or is it always a Frankenstein?

Disclaimer: I don't know if there's an option to post a vertical on ComicFury, but I'm gonna answer regardless :P

I'm kind of the opposite. I get the appeal of a vertical format (at least I started getting it after reading your post), but I guess I'm too attached to the traditional, print friendly 11x17. It got to the point where I AM posting on Tapas and Webtoons, but I sort of decided to screw their custom of verticals and posted my regular format. I know that it's a bad move and I like to explain to myself that THAT'S the reason of my non-existent readership, but I put a lot of thought into the look of a page and I genuinely couldn't be arsed to do it twice. Print friendly format is a must for me, since I DO hope to pitch it to a comic book company one day, and if I don't wanna do both, then vertical is a no-no.

All my comic pages go as long as I need them to be -- I like to make a logical sequence rather than cut off abruptly at some arbitrary page length -- but I'm not making them with print in mind, they're webcomics. That's what the scroll wheel is for.

I guess if you designed longer pages so they could reasonably be cut up into shorter standard page-size pages, that would allow for a print version to be made also.

You're just talking about narrow but long pages, right? No "rows", just panels in vertical format?

I don't see why that couldn't work on CF. I actually read one that does - Heart of Keol. You might have to customize your layout a bit to make it look "right" but it shouldn't be hard. You might even be able to make an infinite-scrolling archive thing work.

And as a primary desktop user, I don't have a problem with it. It wastes a lot of space on my ginormous 2560x1440 native-res screen, but I'm unfortunately used to that.

There's a way to make a vertical comic that will print well, but it's like trying to be Shakespeare. You know how Shakespeare's works appealed to two very different demographics, sometimes with the same lines? For most of us mortals, appealing to just ONE type of audience is hard enough! (ETA: I'm using demographic as an example of a type of a goal; not implying that the audience for vertical and book format are separate, though they can be)

Basically, you design print format pages that flow really nicely when stacked on top of each other. I tried this at first. Decided it was too hard and gave up print. I don't really regret it; printing is a messy process anyway. I knew someone who managed to do something like it, but hers was a horizontal scroll, not vertical. And her books were landscape-oriented IIRC.

One minor-ish problem with posting a vertical comic on CF: you can only post one image per "page." This isn't optimal, load time-wise... which is why my comic often divides 1 strip into 2. e.g. This strip was just one on my main site, where it's comprised of multiple image files. On Comic Fury, I had to divide it into twostrips in order to avoid posting a single gigaaaantic image.

But as you can see, I still post on CF! \o/ Whether or not what I'm doing is a good option will depend on your goals and preferences, of course.

I think it would definitely make print harder to be an option but not impossible, just make it so your normal comic panels are taken out of the normal comic format and lined up vertically. The only reaaon I have my comics vertical is because im lazy and also post on webtoons. I found the best way to go about it is to work on as many panels as you want to show up on a page, save it as a pmg, and then export it as a jpg on Gimp (best free program that retains most of the images quality). I try to keep the size a bit below the file size limit